Author
Topic: Life is Strange

Bought the disc version and I love it. Decent tropey kind of characters, good music, cool time travel, and good voice acting for the most part. The graphics are good because of the environment detail and lighting but wow some of the characters look bad up close. Its like Ken and Barbie face.

Characters barely emote physically (good on their VAs who carry a lot of the weight), some of the lines are shit, but the general story is pretty easy to enjoy and get involved in.

Chloe was oddly easy to root against though... Fun series, it's kind of nostalgic in some ways andI always like the ability to see details in everything and get some sort of commentary on a non-fantasy/sci-fi setting.

My partner and I are on chapter 4 at the moment. Dialogue is a bit clunky in places but I'm really enjoying it. Thematically similar to Donnie Darko and Butterfly Effect, but whereas I didn't care about the characters in the former and hated everything about the latter, I really feel for Max and Chloe and co. Good on ya, Life is Strange.

What do you guys think about the ending?I've heard polarizing (funny since the episode name is Polarized) things about it, some people thinking it's brilliant and some thinking it's pretentious and/or lame that choices supposedly don't matter.

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I mostly pop in occasionally to give my two cents on certain controversial things, so if you disagree then send a PM, because I generally don't check for replies in threads in case I feel like replying and then things get heated/derailed.

I thought the game was pretty good and had promise until the plot came to a full stop in Episode 3 to go "Hey, we have two teenage girls, let's force an underwear scene in the pool."

Cheesecake is fine. Forcing your cheesecake in, with a crowbar, using such force you actually see the framework keeping reality in check groaning under the strain of it... Usually the sign of a piss-poor writing team and a portent of bad things to come.

Ah, you read it as cheesecake? That's interesting, I didn't. They weren't in sexy lingerie or swimsuits, but mismatched and slightly frumpy underwear, and the camera never lingered. I saw it as a rather sweet (if not clunky) demonstration of adolescent friendship/burgeoning romance.

I think they probably wrote themselves into a corner with the ending. It's somewhat rare to find *any* game that has a particularly satisfying ending, but yeah things definitely start to fall apart after awhile in this one. Lotsa character motivations don't stand up to much scrutiny.

It's cheesecake just because there was zero reason otherwise for the scene to happen in that manner. Your average person, including world-derped teenagers, don't commit breaking and entering in a place with active security forces (especially ones you KNOW are on super-high alert because of Episode 2; doubly, doubly so since Max knows by now her powers are fritzed) only to stop for a midnight swim. That's exactly the sort of story you see on World's Dumbest Criminals style TV shows as the 'exception', not the rule. So while not unlikely, the sort of sheer lack of common sense for someone to actually stop and engage in such activity doesn't really work with Chloe or Max as they were written up to that point. They're young yes, but they're not that blatantly stupid. The plot went out of it's way to write them both out of character; thus the scene being nothing but forced cheesecake.

I think it's notable that Dontnod are a European studio, who probably took a lot of cues from Hollywood and American TV to craft Life is Strange, and this is a trope that turns up a lot in both of those mediums. Clumsy and unbelievable, yes, but I didn't interpret it as there for titillation's sake.